Tuesday, April 27, 2010

MESSAGE FROM THE ‘PROPHETS OF PROFITS’:

By Ding Reyes
[Excerpt from BIPED on the Blue Ball [The Supposed-Sapiens Who Laughed at the Dodo], 3rd Edition, Earth Day 2010. Shortly after April 22, Earth Day, this new book by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes is carried in http://love-life.faithweb.com/biped.htm. (Earlier, the site carried the 2nd Edition, 2000.]
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. “Pardon us for forcibly intruding in your dream, Major Tom. We have developed the technology to violate at will your understandable preference to dream in complete privacy, no doubt a petty human fixation.
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“This is a legitimate assertion of our superiority over humans, you who would qualify to be our maleable minions only if you could muster enough wisdom to understand and accept our superiority.
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“Appearing to you like white-costumed versions of the Darth Vader, we are machine-created message carriers who have all the reason to gloat that our power over the human race is invincible, we have taken over the minds of men so you would do the justifying for us for this ongoing operation of conquest we are undertaking, for your own good, and for our ever-legitimate interest to draw profits from these most noble endeavors. You may call us the...
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. ‘...Prophets of Profits...’

Completely helpless as you are now to try to do anything against us, we dare to categorically identify ourselves to you, while many economists of your governments and the academe on your planet still see fit to deny who they really have become.
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“As Prophets of Profits we now enlighten you on the supreme importance and invincibility of the full Logic of the Profit Principle, as somehow explained in detail in the ‘Ten Commandments of the Golden Calf,’ that your governments have signed decades ago as the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade. Listen closely:
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“Earth is now being transformed into a planet inhabited by individuals in complete competition for needs, completely rejecting the grossly unproductive concept of Nature as a generous benefactor and the concept of people unproductively sharing the abundance of the Earth.
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“Humans have harbored these concepts of ‘Dignity” and “Rights,’ without understanding that all ‘human dignity’ worth talking about is the distinction one human can have over others in terms of ownership and command of resources. These resources are not available to the common people because they allow themselves to be limited in their ‘absolute right to acquire, accumulate and control these infinitely.’ Your philosophers have even maligned this basic right as ‘greed,’ and promoted the unproductive superstition that having enough is enough so the others could also have enough! Bah, those others are just lazy, or stupid, or unlucky!
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“ We have conditioned you to worship the ‘Profits Principle’ for the productivity, efficiency, progress, prosperity and convenience that we have promised to all and delivered mainly to a powerful handful. We have also vowed ‘trickles down’ and many of you actually believe it.
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“All resources on your planet should be delivered only to those who have the ability and skill to acquire and exploit them; let all fiercely compete, peacefully or otherwise, by fair means or foul, for them. In this mutually-annihilative competition for survival – humans must be capable of competing for everything; the most important is to win. Losers don’t deserve to control anything, even their own lives. They don’t even deserve to survive and exist.
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“And if parts of your planet get utterly destroyed while you nobly pursue profits and more and more profits, consider that as ‘natural selection’ – Nature is selecting which parts deserve to continue in existence! You have to repudiate such conceptual integrations in ecosystemic approaches as watershed, airshed, and ‘state-range conservation of migratory animals.’ Treat them all as many individual properties.
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“Develop every part of the Earth, such that it will acquire monetary value for selling.
We are helping you to completely abandon your primitive sense of thinking of the Commons. We are helping you discard common sense. You don’t need it, and it only impedes you from optimal pursuit of profits, the real fulfillment of Human Dignity.
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Your species has been described to be in a two-legged run for further consciousness evolution. But through the predominance of the Profit Principle permeating all societies as adopted by them or enforced on them by the powerful among you, all consciousness about commonalities, about synergetic systems, about synergetic collectivities – the second foot — is now being pushed to atrophy by separative selfishness. We’re that powerful!
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The two-legged run of human consciousness evolution has been transformed into a “monoped pogo-walk” by those who have limited every human being to what his or her skin contains, denying even the aura and mental energies.
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The accumulated profits of The Corporations of the world can easily refute and paralyze, silence permanently, ‘neutralize’ all opponents of the Profits Principle.
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“We have been buying off governments and mercenary scientists to bless our inventions, including those most deadly to health and to life itself. Our bio-technology on genes has created plants that need no spraying with pesticides; they are themselves poison! And they are raping and contaminating similar plants and stopping these from having seeds. We shall soon be producing and selling all the seeds, and hold hostage all the staple food supplies of your planet, and our stockholders will be much richer and more powerful than before!
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“We have employed mercenary economists to bless our schemes on trade rules, currency rates and financial policies. We have bought off many of our foes. We can buy their not so glamorous sudden demise. We can buy you off or ‘neutralize’ you... if we need to.”

-o0o-.
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“No, you can’t!!! Uhh! Where am I…? where are those..., uhh...messengers...?”
You fell asleep, Major Tom, but your face looked troubled all that while. Were you having a bad dream? I would, too, if I were in your place!

LECTURE-DISCUSSIONS AND SHARINGS ON THIS CAN BE ARRANGED WITH SANIBLAKAS (send inquiries to dingreyes@yahoo.com.)

Saturday, April 17, 2010

MAGANDANG LABAN... AT PANLABAN

MAGANDA NATING PANLABAN
SA MAGANDANG LABAN
AY MAGANDANG PAGKATAO,
TUMATAGOS PA SA ANYO...

ganda ni Bb. RISA,
ating kandidata
sa pagka-senadora,
pangunahi'y sa pagkatao,
sa katangian, kalooban niya--
subok nang talino, kabayanihan,
taos na malasakit sa taumbayan,
sipag, tapang, at pakumbaba,
alay niyang kaytagal na
sa mahal na Inang Bansa.

itong ganda rin niya
ay tumatagos nga
sa maamong mukha;
di naman ito ang sa kanya
ay pinakamahalaga,
kundi ang sikap na lahat tayo'y
lumaya, guminhawa, lumigaya!
ikampanya natin at iboto si Risa,
ang bayaning pinagpala!

["no. 20" po sa listahan sa balota ang pangalan ni
RISA HONTIVEROS -- Ana Theresia Hontiveros-Baraquel
Magandang panlaban sa Magandang Laban -- Gawin nating senadora!]

abril 18, 2010
--ding reyes
ng subic, zambales

Monday, April 12, 2010

BIPED on the Blue Ball-- 3rd Edition out this week!

The third edition of Biped on the Blue Ball [The Supposed-Sapiens Who Laughed at the Dodo] will be coming out before the end of this week, with a soft-launching scheduled during the session this Friday of the 242nd session of the 20-year-old Kamayan para sa Kalikasan monthly environmental forum at Kamayan-EDSA. The first and second editions, both with some international circulation, were published in 1990 and 2000, respectively.
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. The "Author's Notes" item for this new edition follows below:

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THIS is the third edition of BIPED On the Blue Ball, published in time for the commemoration of Earth Day 2010, on the 20th anniversary of the first edition published as “A Filipino’s contribution to the commemoration of Earth Day on April 22, 1990.” Copies of the first edition were distributed to representatives of about 50 countries at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the kindness of Jim Paredes, the author’s close friend, and Green Earth Movement (Philippines) founder and president.
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. The second edition carries updated inform-ation in its footnotes, culled from the very informative issues of the Daily Grist magazine of the Earth Day international network and from research done for the author by his dearly beloved friend, the former Prof. Anna Ma. S. Torres, then head of the Environment Planning and Management department of Miriam College in Quezon City, Philippines. She was the one who inspired the author to add to the ending of the original two very important elements: first, the framework of Deep Ecology including love and respect for all elements of our living habitat; and second, a touch of optimism, especially at the ending part.
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. The present edition focuses on the current planetwide environmental crisis: “global warming” caused by human activities that have increased the volume of such “greenhouse gases” as carbon dioxide, and raising likewise the temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, all enough to melt large sections of what was for millennia simply undisturbed solid ice, and enough to threaten all coastal areas with permanent inundation, with the expected record rise in the sea levels relative to coastal areas around the various continents.
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. Top scientists of the world have documented precise measurements of greenhouse gas emissions and indicated maximum tolerable levels of further increase to avoid the perilous approach to the point of globally fatal irreversibility. Communities and governments across the world have come, or have at least been going through the motions of coming, to a consensus on what Humankind as a whole has to do to avert a final disaster. But although not at all lacking in the protocols of proper formal discourse among countries, there has been the cons-picuous absence of the spirit of earnest dialogue, with many poor and “developing” countries finding good reason to be frantic for a real search for solutions in terms of mitigation and adaptation, while a few but extremely powerful others either want to completely escape responsibility for the critical state of affairs or are even looking for logical excuses for their “business-as-usual” positions. At the recent debacle at Copenhagen, the United States pulled out from its star-spangled magical tophat a “Copenhagen Accord” that was merely noted but not approved by the countries’ delegations.
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. Still seeking to keep away a pessimistic total darkness view of the future, the author adds a “cryptic message” from the “Prophets of Profits,” that throws a bolt of realization on our Major Tom character, with the implied imminent consequence of spreading to enlighten more and more people for a shining shaft of optimism.
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. The website
http://love-life.faithweb.com/biped.htm, which carries the entire 2nd edition will soon carry this 3rd edition, with subsequent notes, explanations and feedback.
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--ding reyes
subic, zambales
april 12, 2010

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Saturday, April 3, 2010

Attention: Rotarians! 'Is it the Truth?'

LAST HOLY THURSDAY was also "April Fool's Day," but we were apparently not in the mood for any "humorous fooling." So i am posting two days late this article relevant to April Fool's which i wrote and published in a pamphlet, carrying its original date April 1, 2009:

A Personal Challenge:

Is it the Truth?

(The ‘April Fool’ Joke on Human Dignity, with a Request and Serious Challenge to Rotarians and other avowed crusaders for the Truth)

TODAY BEING the first day of April, people are wel­come to doubt anything I say to them that is supposed to be informative. But will many really do so? It de­pends on what I am saying and on my level of credibility with them. Moreover, it depends on how seriously people in this country are taking such a foreign-culture observance as “April Fool’s.” Or, quite the opposite of that condition last mentioned, it depends on how seriously they are taking such a social ideal as “The Truth,” how much they have gotten used to being distrustful of pro­nouncements given them on any which day in the calendar, both April 1 and the “our local cultural equivalent,” December 28, included.
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I do take this ideal very seriously, and most of the time I do take myself seriously on this. Most of those who know me well tend to take me seriously, too, even as I believe that people who claim never to have lied in their lives are themselves lying through their teeth while making such a claim.
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But the direction of my belief on this is for all of us to strive to keep on striving to uphold the Truth in all circumstances, instead of stoning the perceived “lack of worthiness” and “lack of capability” of any which one of us in earnestly seeking to pursue this – leading to the strong suggestion that we all give up on this effort altogether before we can even start.
Upholding the Truth, especially on matters of public consequence, has been important to me especially since the time I was among people crusading for the freedom of the press and for the right of the sovereign body politic to know whatever government would tend to hide from the people or to lie to them about. This has been a firm stand for the people’s democratic rights.
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I uphold the Truth on the real defects and misdeeds of the people’s oppressors because lying against them, by inventing more, would surely backfire on my own credibi­lity when the rumor
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I am so vocally “sure” about gets found out sooner or later to be untrue. It is for protecting the reliability of the people’s valuable “grapevine,” especially in the face of darkness imposed by official secrecies and disinformation.
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I choose to uphold the Truth about anything and everything, also to safeguard my own credibility and fairness and my prestige pertinent to what I would consider important enough to bother to talk about. It is for safeguarding whatever amount of willingness to trust the people still have, as cynicism and outright distrust of one another continues to mount.And, most importantly, I strive to uphold the Truth because it serves Hunan Dignity, whereas, in contrast, the concealment or distortion of the truth violates Human Dignity all around.
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Such dignity demands the full enjoyment of free will, something that can be enjoyed only by people who are in the position to make informed choices among all available options for individual and collective acts of self-determination in the service of their own best legitimate individual and collective self interests. How can anyone assert the basic human dignity in free and informed choice if a substantial part of such information is being withheld or distorted? We have to uphold the Truth in order to uphold the dignity of the human species, which is the very same Human Dignity we are all breathing together.
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There was a time in the history of our people, quite recent in my long-view reckoning, when a very young patriotic sage had only to write in his Kartilya masterpiece that “to a person of honor, one’s word is no less than an oath.” The admonition proved effective because in his time pledges and oaths were really taken seriously as solemn and sacred. Surely such admonition can hardly have any impact today when even oaths administered before microphones for amplification and recording are not taken seriously by those who hear them, including those who hear their own voices taking them!What has been happening to our country? Slowly but surely we have largely become a nation of people who have stopped trusting one another because we have apparently stopped being trustworthy.
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Those who would try and stop the rising tide of rampant and habitual lying are simply disregarded on partisan or personal grounds or, worse, heckled or bribed into silence. It’s not at all that we have become a nation of liars; but we really have become a nation of people who countenance lying, who have gotten used to it, who have learned to laugh off this “trivial” defect and who gradually increase the fre- quency of directly engaging in “mild forms” of it.
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. To be sure, we still see public reminders to uphold the Truth “in everything we think, say and do.” In every public area in every town we see the question “Is it the Truth?” prominently displayed with the logo of the Rotary Club International, followed by three other questions that make sense only if the first one is answered in the affirmative. Those questions are displayed prominently in all the clubs’ concrete public posters and pieces of their literature, and recited by the members in meetings of their local Clubs.
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Is it the truth that Rotarians everywhere do take this question seriously and call upon others in the localities to follow their lead? I’m not quite sure. When I asked a friend for his views on a proposed open personal pledge among Rotarians for a Culture of Truth, he could not keep himself from laughing in my face, from trying to disabuse me of my supposedly naïve belief that all Rotarians still took the Four-Way Test seriously. He said that in their local club and in many others this Test has become just a laughing matter, no more than a decoration on the wall where they hold their weekly meetings. “We are not really expected or required to take this seriously anymore!” he said, sounding like he was even quite proud of that development.
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. Unless the majority of local Rotary Clubs can very truthfully claim that they do take the Four-Way Test very seriously, there’s no point in even trying to establish the identity of my friend, who has recently resigned his membership anyway. Perhaps, the more product­ive thing Rotarians can do at this point is to make sure that members of their own local clubs really take this Truth advocacy very seriously, as a distinct contribution to strengthening the moral fiber and consequent unity of their respective communities and as a distinct and much more profound contribution to nation-building. They would just have to shun all tendencies to give way to “pragmatic defeatism” before they can even start. Clubs can start implementing actual programs with this focus. And before they actually do, perhaps they can consider refraining in the meantime from constructing more public posters that imply they really uphold the Four-Way Test in their own collective and individual lives.
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I am now personally raising a challenge and urgent request to all Rotarians in this country to seriously consider personally taking the pledge below, mainly to their respective selves and also, if they so decide, to their fellow Club members.

A Rotarian’s Commitment to the Culture of Truth
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As a Filipino citizen and as a Rotarian dedicated to a life of “Service Above Self,” I venerate the value of co­nsistently UPHOLDING THE TRUTH in my private and public life, in order to build a humane and just society.
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I therefore commit to actively help in building a CULTURE OF TRUTH in this country, in my commu­nity, career, and family, and enjoin my fellow-Rotarians to do the same by consistently personifying integrity and censuring dishonesty at all levels of our human life. This commitment I shall keep upon my honor and fulfill preferably within the official performance of my duties to the Rotary Club of which that I am an active member, or in my personal capacity, in addition to such official performance, and independent of it, if necessary.

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Neither I nor the Consumers and Communicators for Truthful Information (CCTI), which I had co-founded in 2003 under a slightly different name, will have to know who among the Rotarians would decide to take this oath or pledge. What is much more important is for this com­mitment to be signed not merely with pens but with actu­al consistent deeds.
(For more info on CCTI, plese click: http://consumers4truth.4t.com.)
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Just as we refuse to believe that many Rotarians are just laughing at the Four-Way Test like my friend was saying they are, we also declare with much confidence the firm belief and conviction that there actually are more Rotarians for a Culture of Truth, even if all or the majority would for any reason decide to remain anonymous.
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There are other organizations that are avowed crusad­ers for the Culture of Truth. For example, the scouts start their oath with the declaration that “a scout is trustwor­thy.” The scouting groups can take steps to strength­en their own internal character formation programs to make sure scouts do grow up as trustworthy citizens for this country. The same holds for organizations dedicated to exalt the memory of our heroes and other personalities who were crusaders for the Truth during their respective lifetimes. Many of these groups are giving services to the citizenry, like projects for their education, health, live­lihood, food, etc. But one service much more needed by Filipinos during this very difficult period of nation-building is effective help for all to regain the full flowering of our individual and collective sense of honor.
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Even though this challenge and urgent request is now being written and released on April Fool’s Day, April 1, 2009, I do hope you would take it seriously for the sake of our collective Human Dignity. Otherwise, we may continue having an April Fool’s Day atmosphere in our Philippines the whole year every year.
--ding reyes
subic, zambales
april 4, 2009 (original date)

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Good Friday Thoughts Before Elections

The elements of "Trapo" Politics are aptly represented in distinct roles played by the various politicians, media, military, comelec, corporations, and various sections of the populace and electorate...
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. Good Friday Drama had unfolded, all the way to Glorious Miracle of Easter, after all that torture, after that historic Death.
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. WE have our own self-chosen roles to play, even as the many blessed heroes and heroines in our midst passionately LOVE the people, the same people who had cheered "Alleluia!!!" and "Hossanah!" during the earlier days of optimism in winnability and later shifted to mob-shouting "Crucify him!" when the tides had consciously turned.
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. Let us realize, as wizened up by a longer view of people's development and empowerment: About Good Friday and elections, the real story is not in the dramatic, gory details.